Wednesday, April 20, 2022

Resentment and Race, by Gregory Hood - The Unz Review

 After President Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, the Left consolidated control over the media and platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This victory was more important than Joe Biden’s win in 2020 and the Democrat takeover of Congress. Media power determines what is politically possible. Politicians dare not move outside the boundaries of “respectable” debate.

Leftist control of academia was the first step to victory. Liberal academics thought up justifications for anti-white racial privileges in law. They explained why conservative speech is violence and leftist violence is speech.

Censorship began with white advocates, but it spread to InfoWars, One America News, countless podcasters and YouTubers, those who doubt the government’s statements about COVID-19, and even the right-leaning humor site The Babylon Bee. These meant countless careers cut short, even financial ruin for some.

America is not a free country. Misnamed “civil rights laws” have given the federal government broad, oppressive powers that no one anticipated. Accepting this is necessary for action – which is still possible because the system is both overbearing and vulnerable. “If their victory were inevitable, their propaganda wouldn’t be necessary,” some say. The moral controversies that explode after mild, obviously true comments from figures with little media power show how terrified our rulers are.

It’s especially important when we hear from those in academia, such as Professor Amy Wax of Penn Saw School. Once again, this distinguished scholar and intellectual has said common-sense things. Once again, the campaign against her proves she’s right.

“There is just a tremendous amount of resentment and shame of non-Western peoples against Western peoples for Western peoples’ outsized achievements and contributions,” she said on Tucker Carlson’s morning show. She was referring not just to blacks but also Asian Indians, a group with disproportionate power in this country.

Prof. Amy Wax
Prof. Amy Wax

Media Matters promptly published Prof. Wax’s remarks, but with no attempt to rebut them. It thoughtfully made a transcript, and included a few supposedly extreme utterances from her past. Here are two:

  • “Wax singled out certain groups, including ‘Blacks’ and Hispanics for not conforming to what she described as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘free market’ cultural values.

Differences in crime rates or social failure make it hard to argue with this. The Smithsonian African History Museum even complained that an “emphasis on scientific method,” the “Protestant Work Ethic,” politeness, and proper grammar are core elements of whiteness. Media Matters should take it up with the museum.

  • “[Wax stated] that immigrants are attracted to ‘countries ruled by white Europeans’ and affirming that she did not shrink away from describing those countries and cultures as ‘superior.’”

That’s what’s meant by “voting with your feet.” I wish they didn’t have such a high opinion of us. If they had more pride, we wouldn’t have The Great Replacement.

Prof. Wax’s sin was to say that non-whites envy our accomplishments. Why else would they want to come live with us? Blacks don’t hesitate to express envy and even hatred of whites.

James Baldwin said that “no Negro living in America. . . has not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter in a day, to violate, out of motives of the cruelest vengeance, their women, to break the bodies of all white people.” Steve Sailer recently cited James Baldwin’s essay on visiting a Swiss village:

For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modem world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.

Barack Obama wrote about his own alienation when he visited Europe. “It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I’d imagined it,” he wrote in Dreams From My Father. “It just wasn’t mine. I felt as if I were living out someone else’s romance.” He was.

James Baldwin (Credit Image: © Keystone Press Agency / ZUMA Wire)
James Baldwin (Credit Image: © Keystone Press Agency / ZUMA Wire)

Indian immigrant Suketu Mehta, a Journalism Professor (of course), writes in her refreshingly hostile This Land Is Our Land that mass non-white immigration may hurt the West, but we have it coming: “It is every migrant’s dream to see the tables turned, to see long lines of Americans and Britons and in front of the Bangladeshi or Mexican or Nigerian embassy, begging for a residence visa.”

W.E.B. Du Bois put his feelings for whites in poetry: “I hate them, Oh!/I hate them well,/I hate them, Christ!/As I hate hell!/If I were God,/I’d sound their knell/This day!”

In the same spirit but with less style, Prof. Brittney Cooper of Rutgers University recently said of us, “We need to take those m***erfu**ers out.”

Are non-whites right to be envious? Of course. As Charles Murray explained in Human Accomplishment: “What the human species is today it owes in astonishing degree to what was accomplished in just half a dozen centuries by the peoples of one small portion of the northwestern Eurasian land mass.”

Sam Francis criticized Human Accomplishment for not going far enough: “Dr. Murray, by any reasonable standard, has shown that Western white men have produced most of human civilization, but we already knew that, and those of us who didn’t will refuse to learn it from Dr. Murray.” Francis added that Dr. Murray “is one of the relatively few mainstream writers capable of telling the declining Western world something important about the racial foundations of its civilization and why that foundation is beginning to crumble. . . . [T]he greatest failure of this book is that he hasn’t done it.”

Let us not be too hard on Dr. Murray. He had to keep his job. Many are calling for the University of Pennsylvania to fire Prof. Wax. The school was already investigating her.

Non-whites are defensive and insecure. Drawing lessons from pop culture risks “cherry-picking,” but look at the anti-white revenge fantasies in films and shows such as Django UnchainedBlack Panther, and American Gods. There is a similar hatred of Confederate and American monuments. Leftists even rage against classical architecture.

Non-whites in the First World shout threats and demands as they walk in a civilization they could never have built. What happens if we just say no? What happens if we explain what they owe us?

Joe Sobran wrote this in 1997:

Western man towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible. It’s Western exploration, science, and conquest that have revealed the world to itself. Other races feel like subjects of Western power long after colonialism, imperialism, and slavery have disappeared. The charge of racism puzzles whites who feel not hostility, but only baffled good will, because they don’t grasp what it really means: humiliation. The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. And superiority excites envy. Destroying white civilization is the inmost desire of the league of designated victims we call “minorities.”

Some say even paintings of accomplished scientists and doctors should be taken down because they hurt non-whites’ feelings. There’s no end to this process, no point at which non-whites will feel that white, Western Civilization has been sufficiently shamed and degraded. Our mere existence is the problem.

We’re facing a primal instinct. One of the key elements of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil is the concept of “slave morality.” As he explained in The Genealogy of Morals, “The beginning of the slaves’ revolt in morality occurs when ressentiment itself turns creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of those beings who, denied the proper response of action, compensate for it only with imaginary revenge.” [emphasis mine]

This “imaginary revenge” is behind every headline about a statue, painting, or name that needs to be removed. It’s a constant media theme. And telling non-whites their current station is our fault leads to real, violent revenge.

Raging against racial disparities is like protesting bad weather, disease, or the reality of death. The science is settled. Race is real. Biology has consequences. When our society admits no other explanation for racial differences than white evil, it fosters burning ressentment. Constant anger and violence are further proof whites need a homeland.

What Prof. Wax said shouldn’t be controversial. It’s like talking about The Great Replacement: hate speech only when someone who doesn’t like what’s happening notices. When James Baldwin or Barack Obama notice, it’s praiseworthy insight.

Whites built the modern world. We can build greater wonders still, if we have freedom and sovereignty. If not, we are doomed to endless, unquenchable bitterness from our non-white “fellow Americans.” Faced with that prospect, “white nationalism” is basic common sense and self-preservation.

https://www.unz.com/ghood/resentment-and-race/